Retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews sent an email to his three children, and he’s not very impressed with what they’ve managed to achieve in life:
Dear All Three
With last evening’s crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.
It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.
Ouch. But wait, there’s more!
So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgement to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.
In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn’t for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.
“one cock up to the next”? “copulation-driven”?
No pun intended, right?
Anyway, I’m presenting it here without much comment, as no-one save for the individuals concerned actually know exactly what the circumstances behind it are. But wow – the full text is worth a read. Mr Crews is not happy.
I’ve shared lots of SA music on this blog before. Not just rubbish stuff because it’s fun to ridicule, but some rather decent things as well – Ashtray Electric and Isochronous spring immediately to mind.
Right now, I just can’t get enough of this track from local lads Gangs of Ballet:
Many are comparing this track to Coldplay and Audioslave and I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but that piano is so very Placebo to me.
But we should stop comparing them to other musicians, because they’re their own band and that’s their own sound.
And a damn good sound it is too. Fine work.
Waiting for my fish & chips in Agulhas, I spotted this across the road:
Which is all very well, but I really prefer mine to lie still on the plate while I enjoy it.
According to Sky News today yesterday (note subtle hint that this might be a post-dated blogpost):
The Chief Medical Officer has raised the prospect of a future without cures for common infections – unless antibiotics are used more responsibly.
You don’t say, Professor Dame Sally Davies?
This isn’t news.
Over ten years ago, while in Oxford, I attended a seminar by Dr David Livermore, then Director of HPA’s Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory in the UK. He basically told the gathered microbiologists (I have no idea what the correct collective noun is here – “a culture”?) that we were all buggered, because we were heading back to a pre-antibiotic era due to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance.
The effect of his stark warning on an educated, usually sceptical audience was interesting. Every single person agreed. Because we were already seeing more and more resistant bacteria in our laboratories every single day and we were having to resort to more and more outlandish, expensive and (in some cases) relatively untested antibiotic treatment regimens to cure patients of their infections.
But the time will come (soon), when we run out of antibiotics and we’ll be at the mercy of what are – at the moment at least – minor infections. Advanced surgery like transplantation, will become impossible – immunosuppressed patients will simply not survive the inevitable infections without prophylactic (preventative) antibiotic treatment. Even “basic” surgery will be impossible for the same reasons. Anything around the abdomen – appendicitis, for example – will effectively mean game over.
But it’s not just this “running out of options” that is the issue:
When somebody has a severe infection – say blood poisoning – causing a high fever, a hospital clinician will dispatch blood samples to the lab to find out exactly what he is dealing with. But that takes time. “He will start you on antibiotics because that will kill infection within 48 hours,” says Livermore. “So during 48 hours, you are being treated blind. The more resistant your bacteria are, the less likely the antibiotic is going to work.”
It’s an unpleasant thought, so why aren’t we more concerned?
Well, because this is an insidious problem. There’s hasn’t been and there’s not going to be one specific, defining moment in this horror story. No 9/11, no Marikana, no December 21, 2012. It’s just slowly happening and sadly, we’re pretty powerless to stop it. Here in South Africa, we have already had problems with first MDR, then XDR tuberculosis. If you think that it’s all ok, because things are going to end there, then maybe you shouldn’t google “TDR-TB”.
Professor Dame Sally Davies blames over-prescription of antibiotics for the rise is resistance, but the evidence for this is far from conclusive.
Livermore again:
Governments worldwide are pressing for reduced antibiotic use, hoping thereby to reverse resistance trends. Is success likely? The evidence is mixed, and expectations should be tempered by the growing realization that many resistant bacteria are biologically fit, making them difficult to displace.
Yes, he’s basically suggesting that the bacteria are actually too strong for us to defeat. We are being outwitted – out evolved – by microbes. It’s kind of difficult to stomach, but:
“The emergence of antibiotic resistance is the most eloquent example of Darwin’s principle of evolution that there ever was,” says Livermore. “It is a war of attrition. It is naive to think we can win.”
So there you have it. Happy thoughts for the weekend. I just thought that I really should tell you today, because with the country and the world so very full of good news right now, you probably needed a reality check.
None of it matters. We’re all buggered.
